What's wild about the housing crisis is that its a market that's shaped in so many ways by the intended and unintended concenquences of public policy.
Zoning, as many have pointed out, created the idea that everyone should live in single-family homes, ideally on fairly large lots. That level of density is difficult to serve in anything other than private vehicles, which creates the downstream congestion issues, as well as being really challenging to sustain from a property-tax base perspective.
At the same time, we decided that home ownership was a good as it allows people to build wealth, so we created public policy to support home ownership. But, that turned homes into an asset class, driving up prices, creating disincentives for a greater variety of rental properties, and creating our current divide between those up us lucky enough to have bought a home before they became unaffordable. It also tends to tie people to places, which means when local economies slow and stall, it's hard for people to move to where the jobs are as nobody wants to buy their houses -- so governments then are pressured to bring new economic opportunties to these people via tax incentives and other support for industry.
We've ended up creating a strong incentive for suburbian style development. Greenfield development hasn't traditionally run into the kind of NIMBY push-back that new development in established areas can, plus I'd imagine it's cheaper to build a whole bunch of similar homes on a green field then smaller in-fill developments in urban areas. Those places are also initially cheaper to buy and incentives to first-time buyers makes them affordable. If you have a family and want a bit of extra space and for your kids to be able to walk to school, it kind of becomes the default option.
My own experience -- I live in a detatched house in a pretty suburban style development in a small city. We came here from Toronto about a dozen years ago. We looked at a lot of options. Everything in Toronto was really expensive, especially when considering that a lot of the housing stock was older, so there was the purchase price plus the renovations/repairs that would probably come up. We looked at moving outside of Toronto and commuting, but the commuting costs plus the slightly less-expensive homes still didn't add up -- and the lost time with family would have sucked. We managed to move outside of Toronto AND find jobs in this community, which worked, but if we had to do it today, we probably couldn't afford the house we're in! I was willing to consider condos in Toronto (I actually don't really like the tasks associated with owning homes) but family-sized condos are few and far between. The incentives to home ownership meant renting didn't really make sense and, again, there aren't a ton of family sized rental properties and those that exist aren't really a lot cheaper than just buying a house.
It's a market failure, influenced by layers of public policy at the local, provincial and federal level that require some sober thinking to fix. Instead, we're getting this kind of knee-jerk, buckshot approach that probably isn't going to work and -- in the case of the greenbelt -- involves some really dumb trade-offs. Maybe we should start by seperating housing from home ownership and focus on creating more options on the former (that might include the latter). At the same time, think about housing options that aren't just affordable for residents, but are also sustainable for communities in terms of providing ammendities, so cities/towns aren't continually scrambling to meet local needs on inadequate tax bases.
"Even as they decry NIMBYism that blocks new housing from being built, Ford and his government have fallen victim to a kind of NIMBYism of the mind: they can’t imagine anyone wanting to live anywhere other than suburbia — certainly, they can’t imagine anyone being happy there..."
On Air Quotes Media podcast "Curse of Politics", Kory Teneycke (the c/Conservative on the panel, who's worked on and off for the Ontario PCs since Ford's election) has said repeatedly that the aspiration of the public as a whole is the white picket fence suburban home as opposed to renting, and that successful politicians will focus on those aspirations as opposed to other forms of housing. Your commentary about the OPC absolutely lines up with Mr. Teneycke's statements. Is there polling that supports those statements, for Toronto, the rest of the GTA and the remainder of Ontario?
(Yes, I would love a bigger home in Toronto than the small detached that I own now in Toronto, but specifically, I would like my kids to have their homes in Toronto as well so I can see them, and their first homes will by necessity be small like the one where they grew up. So, we need more of the small ones. Not sure where that fits in the OPC "aspirations".)
What is particularly galling is the obsession with the obsolete model of home ownership and accompanying crippling debt in order to “own” a suburban pipe dream.
I understand that mortgages are ridiculously high in the Toronto region, but am curious why the focus on crippling debt? Someone who pays a mortgage for 25 years then lives the rest of their life with property taxes and maintenance but no rent. Whereas those of us who are still renting, face the uncertainty of eviction, rent increases, and knowing that we will never have a reduced cost of living from the mortgage being paid off nor will we have any investment to pull from in old age from selling a home. My rent is more than what the mortgage payment would've been had I qualified 20 years ago - almost double actually. So I'm not convinced that home ownership is bad in and of itself - perhaps policies which led the supply of housing to increase so that the market prices returned to balance are what is more important. (In a variety of settings. But I can tell you when we move we are moving rural - for many reasons, not the least of which is a city council who can't manage finances and is ruining the city in ways that I don't want to be around to witness in a decade.)
One of the problems with releasing a bunch of land from something like Toronto's Green Belt or the BC Agricultural Land Reserve is that it's at most a brief respite from the challenge of meeting housing needs with more density. You can only release a piece of formerly reserved land for development once; you might get a short boost in the number of detached homes and an easing of prices or at least price increases, but inexorable population growth in the large urban centers means before long, you still need more housing and there's no more land to release for development.
You can keep pushing the boundaries of the cities outwards, but we've only to look at US areas that've build extensive exurbs to understand the approach ends up choking on transportation, infrastructure, and commuting problems. I know a lot of people who were determined to get that detached single family home, and are now burdened with 1-2 hour daily commutes each way as they travel between a home at the periphery of the Lower Mainland and work in the urban core.
Building more homes where people work is a better approach, but it's going to require changing the types of housing in existing neighborhoods to deliver what families need. Condo towers are expensive to build, and are a big change from the single family residences that a lot of Canadians prefer. Developers have also settled into a "sweet spot" of 2 bedrooms for many of those homes, which leads to cramped conditions for families. I think we need to start building more townhouses or rowhouses, with 3-4 bedrooms, a private entrance, and at least some patch of yard. The obvious place to start building this housing is in existing neighborhoods of single family homes. More density, utilization of existing community amenities like schools, and less expensive to build.
Why is Ford and the Ontario PC party obsessed with suburban development? Because people who own their own homes in the suburbs tend to vote PC (and Conservative). It's a sociodemographic numbers game. The types of young people who aspire to suburban home owning are the cornerstone of the PC Party, nothing else ultimately is more important.
As for the appeal of suburban living, few immigrate to Canada hoping to live in an small urban condo. They could have done that back home where it was cheaper and more vibrant. Immigrants want detached housing with a backyard and attached garage. Ask any newcomer in Brampton.
If any provincial government wants to encourage housing focus on the silly zoning rules, endless regulation and development fees which mostly stem from municipalities.
But in many cases ther zoning rules are driven by the wishes of the existing neighbourhood (NIMBY's). Municipal gov'ts tend to respond (or over-respond) to the concerns of constitutents. So it's really on everyone to change the way we look at housing.
I think the author is really on to something with the "nostalgia" angle. It's always easier for people to see the past than the future. I would argue that Ford's axing of the environmental structures - including the effective and lucrative cap and trade deal - at the beginning of his reign was related to his thinking that "we didn't need that stuff when I was a kid."
Interesting piece but but seems to me to have 2 obvious faults: Obviously it's not just Ford who wants a suburban home - otherwise no one would be looking to buy this land and salivating at a billion-dollar profit. A suburban home I guess is not the writer's dream, so he imagines in the face of this billion-dollar counter-evidence that everyone else also looks at suburbia as quaint nostalgia.
Also, of course, unlike affordable housing built by the province or city it doesn't require public money to build these houses - because people will buy them and pay taxes on them until forever.
But it does require public money to service them: roads, schools, emergency services, garbage pickup, etc. All those are more expensive when development is less dense. The initial development fees (rolled into everyone' mortgages) make the initial payment, but sustaining services without the Ponzi scheme of never-ending development (or finding from senior levels of government aka: other taxpayers) has proven to be challenging.
The way I read McGrath's article, it's not that nobody wants suburbia, it's that it's a mistake to assume everybody wants suburbia, and Ford's policies have favoured suburban detached house construction while neglecting or making it harder to build anything else.
It's also worth noting that while everybody might in an ideal world prefer a detached house, preferences change when presented with the cost of one compared to the cost of an alternative. This is especially the case when the cost of a detached house isn't artificially depressed below market rates by single-family zoning.
You are absolutely right about the high rise. It's not a good solution for a young family. I grew up in suburban Ottawa, and it was a fine childhood.
I now live in downtown Ottawa with my wife and two young kids in a semi-detached house with a small yard. We used to live on the ground floor of a three-story rental. It was only two bedrooms, so we moved when we had the second kid. Three to four story buildings, with three-bedroom units, are nice spaces for a family. You still feel very connected to the neighbourhood. BUT, there must be PLENTY of communal park spaces (even if they're small in scale) and community centers.
In the burbs, families usually seek to internalize their needs (pool in the backyard, media/TV room, rec-room in the basement, fenced yard to run around, basketball net in the driveway, etc.).
In an urban setting, you want and need those same things, but you share them with others. We go to community pools or the beach in the summer. My kids play in the park across the street with the neighbour-kids. We walk over to the school to play in the playground on the weekend. We need to be more watchful of the kids, which isn't always convenient, and the communal spaces suffer from the usual urban problems, and sometimes you don't want to share. The upside is that we know our neighbours very well and there is more variety within easy walking distance. It's easy to be a single-car family downtown. Some of our friends have no car, though I have to say owning a car is very convenient.
We're all just as happy as our suburban friends. A mix of urban and suburban options would seem ideal. But the towers are not for families. I would say more 3-4 story buildings (condos or rentals) designed for families, with matching community parks and centers, is the way to increase density without increasing misery. Just my 2 cents.
I think towers under a dozen or so stories are probably OK. I live in a 14 story building & lots of kids here. My daughter lives in a 12 story building downtown & that's where my granddaughter has grown up.
But agreed anything much higher is not suitable for children.
It's not a binary choice of high rise vs suburbia. Midrise buildings, townhomes and stacked townhomes, semi-detached houses, garden suites, and 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6-plexes are all part of the mix. (For example, if you look at places like London, Paris, and even New York City, it's not all high rises; buildings in the first two cities tend to be around 6 stories tall, and even Manhattan is dominated by 10-story apartment buildings.)
You can densify a _lot_ without moving to high rises, but if you look at zoning maps of Toronto, it's dominated by areas where (until recently) it was _literally illegal_ to build anything other than single-family detached houses. Therefore, developers had to go through a huge amount of paperwork and bureaucracy to get a "variance" approved, incurring a big fixed cost and requiring big delays. If you have to go to all that trouble no matter how much you're densifying, you're going to apply for the biggest thing you can possibly get, because it's more profitable.
It's a tradeoff. There's plenty of people who want to live close to work, trading space for time. Then they can get around by taking transit or even walking, instead of living further out and spending more time driving to and from work, fighting traffic. Conversely, there's other people who would like to live further out and have more space; perhaps they only need to go to the office once or twice a week, so they're fine with a longer commute.
As John describes, pushing land reforms so that municipalities allow more height and density, especially close to transit, would allow the more "urbanist" people to live where they want. And this would also help reduce the cost of land further out, helping suburbanites. Right now, restrictions on height and density are like pushing down on a balloon: the people who would have lived in the centre don't disappear, they move further out. So the demand just gets spread out, pushing up land prices everywhere. (It's unbelievable that the average home in Tillsonburg is more expensive than in Tokyo.)
What's wild about the housing crisis is that its a market that's shaped in so many ways by the intended and unintended concenquences of public policy.
Zoning, as many have pointed out, created the idea that everyone should live in single-family homes, ideally on fairly large lots. That level of density is difficult to serve in anything other than private vehicles, which creates the downstream congestion issues, as well as being really challenging to sustain from a property-tax base perspective.
At the same time, we decided that home ownership was a good as it allows people to build wealth, so we created public policy to support home ownership. But, that turned homes into an asset class, driving up prices, creating disincentives for a greater variety of rental properties, and creating our current divide between those up us lucky enough to have bought a home before they became unaffordable. It also tends to tie people to places, which means when local economies slow and stall, it's hard for people to move to where the jobs are as nobody wants to buy their houses -- so governments then are pressured to bring new economic opportunties to these people via tax incentives and other support for industry.
We've ended up creating a strong incentive for suburbian style development. Greenfield development hasn't traditionally run into the kind of NIMBY push-back that new development in established areas can, plus I'd imagine it's cheaper to build a whole bunch of similar homes on a green field then smaller in-fill developments in urban areas. Those places are also initially cheaper to buy and incentives to first-time buyers makes them affordable. If you have a family and want a bit of extra space and for your kids to be able to walk to school, it kind of becomes the default option.
My own experience -- I live in a detatched house in a pretty suburban style development in a small city. We came here from Toronto about a dozen years ago. We looked at a lot of options. Everything in Toronto was really expensive, especially when considering that a lot of the housing stock was older, so there was the purchase price plus the renovations/repairs that would probably come up. We looked at moving outside of Toronto and commuting, but the commuting costs plus the slightly less-expensive homes still didn't add up -- and the lost time with family would have sucked. We managed to move outside of Toronto AND find jobs in this community, which worked, but if we had to do it today, we probably couldn't afford the house we're in! I was willing to consider condos in Toronto (I actually don't really like the tasks associated with owning homes) but family-sized condos are few and far between. The incentives to home ownership meant renting didn't really make sense and, again, there aren't a ton of family sized rental properties and those that exist aren't really a lot cheaper than just buying a house.
It's a market failure, influenced by layers of public policy at the local, provincial and federal level that require some sober thinking to fix. Instead, we're getting this kind of knee-jerk, buckshot approach that probably isn't going to work and -- in the case of the greenbelt -- involves some really dumb trade-offs. Maybe we should start by seperating housing from home ownership and focus on creating more options on the former (that might include the latter). At the same time, think about housing options that aren't just affordable for residents, but are also sustainable for communities in terms of providing ammendities, so cities/towns aren't continually scrambling to meet local needs on inadequate tax bases.
"Even as they decry NIMBYism that blocks new housing from being built, Ford and his government have fallen victim to a kind of NIMBYism of the mind: they can’t imagine anyone wanting to live anywhere other than suburbia — certainly, they can’t imagine anyone being happy there..."
On Air Quotes Media podcast "Curse of Politics", Kory Teneycke (the c/Conservative on the panel, who's worked on and off for the Ontario PCs since Ford's election) has said repeatedly that the aspiration of the public as a whole is the white picket fence suburban home as opposed to renting, and that successful politicians will focus on those aspirations as opposed to other forms of housing. Your commentary about the OPC absolutely lines up with Mr. Teneycke's statements. Is there polling that supports those statements, for Toronto, the rest of the GTA and the remainder of Ontario?
(Yes, I would love a bigger home in Toronto than the small detached that I own now in Toronto, but specifically, I would like my kids to have their homes in Toronto as well so I can see them, and their first homes will by necessity be small like the one where they grew up. So, we need more of the small ones. Not sure where that fits in the OPC "aspirations".)
What is particularly galling is the obsession with the obsolete model of home ownership and accompanying crippling debt in order to “own” a suburban pipe dream.
I understand that mortgages are ridiculously high in the Toronto region, but am curious why the focus on crippling debt? Someone who pays a mortgage for 25 years then lives the rest of their life with property taxes and maintenance but no rent. Whereas those of us who are still renting, face the uncertainty of eviction, rent increases, and knowing that we will never have a reduced cost of living from the mortgage being paid off nor will we have any investment to pull from in old age from selling a home. My rent is more than what the mortgage payment would've been had I qualified 20 years ago - almost double actually. So I'm not convinced that home ownership is bad in and of itself - perhaps policies which led the supply of housing to increase so that the market prices returned to balance are what is more important. (In a variety of settings. But I can tell you when we move we are moving rural - for many reasons, not the least of which is a city council who can't manage finances and is ruining the city in ways that I don't want to be around to witness in a decade.)
One of the problems with releasing a bunch of land from something like Toronto's Green Belt or the BC Agricultural Land Reserve is that it's at most a brief respite from the challenge of meeting housing needs with more density. You can only release a piece of formerly reserved land for development once; you might get a short boost in the number of detached homes and an easing of prices or at least price increases, but inexorable population growth in the large urban centers means before long, you still need more housing and there's no more land to release for development.
You can keep pushing the boundaries of the cities outwards, but we've only to look at US areas that've build extensive exurbs to understand the approach ends up choking on transportation, infrastructure, and commuting problems. I know a lot of people who were determined to get that detached single family home, and are now burdened with 1-2 hour daily commutes each way as they travel between a home at the periphery of the Lower Mainland and work in the urban core.
Building more homes where people work is a better approach, but it's going to require changing the types of housing in existing neighborhoods to deliver what families need. Condo towers are expensive to build, and are a big change from the single family residences that a lot of Canadians prefer. Developers have also settled into a "sweet spot" of 2 bedrooms for many of those homes, which leads to cramped conditions for families. I think we need to start building more townhouses or rowhouses, with 3-4 bedrooms, a private entrance, and at least some patch of yard. The obvious place to start building this housing is in existing neighborhoods of single family homes. More density, utilization of existing community amenities like schools, and less expensive to build.
Why is Ford and the Ontario PC party obsessed with suburban development? Because people who own their own homes in the suburbs tend to vote PC (and Conservative). It's a sociodemographic numbers game. The types of young people who aspire to suburban home owning are the cornerstone of the PC Party, nothing else ultimately is more important.
As for the appeal of suburban living, few immigrate to Canada hoping to live in an small urban condo. They could have done that back home where it was cheaper and more vibrant. Immigrants want detached housing with a backyard and attached garage. Ask any newcomer in Brampton.
If any provincial government wants to encourage housing focus on the silly zoning rules, endless regulation and development fees which mostly stem from municipalities.
But in many cases ther zoning rules are driven by the wishes of the existing neighbourhood (NIMBY's). Municipal gov'ts tend to respond (or over-respond) to the concerns of constitutents. So it's really on everyone to change the way we look at housing.
True, however it's the municipal politicians who make the most noise about the problem and IMHO should provide the leadership
Agreed. Municipal politicians need to show some leadership and stop pandering to NIMBY constituents.
I think the author is really on to something with the "nostalgia" angle. It's always easier for people to see the past than the future. I would argue that Ford's axing of the environmental structures - including the effective and lucrative cap and trade deal - at the beginning of his reign was related to his thinking that "we didn't need that stuff when I was a kid."
Interesting piece but but seems to me to have 2 obvious faults: Obviously it's not just Ford who wants a suburban home - otherwise no one would be looking to buy this land and salivating at a billion-dollar profit. A suburban home I guess is not the writer's dream, so he imagines in the face of this billion-dollar counter-evidence that everyone else also looks at suburbia as quaint nostalgia.
Also, of course, unlike affordable housing built by the province or city it doesn't require public money to build these houses - because people will buy them and pay taxes on them until forever.
But it does require public money to service them: roads, schools, emergency services, garbage pickup, etc. All those are more expensive when development is less dense. The initial development fees (rolled into everyone' mortgages) make the initial payment, but sustaining services without the Ponzi scheme of never-ending development (or finding from senior levels of government aka: other taxpayers) has proven to be challenging.
I'm aware of the service costs, but I suppose that's what taxes are for.
The way I read McGrath's article, it's not that nobody wants suburbia, it's that it's a mistake to assume everybody wants suburbia, and Ford's policies have favoured suburban detached house construction while neglecting or making it harder to build anything else.
It's also worth noting that while everybody might in an ideal world prefer a detached house, preferences change when presented with the cost of one compared to the cost of an alternative. This is especially the case when the cost of a detached house isn't artificially depressed below market rates by single-family zoning.
John Michael, good article. Have missed reading you. Welcome and I hope you post here again!
You are absolutely right about the high rise. It's not a good solution for a young family. I grew up in suburban Ottawa, and it was a fine childhood.
I now live in downtown Ottawa with my wife and two young kids in a semi-detached house with a small yard. We used to live on the ground floor of a three-story rental. It was only two bedrooms, so we moved when we had the second kid. Three to four story buildings, with three-bedroom units, are nice spaces for a family. You still feel very connected to the neighbourhood. BUT, there must be PLENTY of communal park spaces (even if they're small in scale) and community centers.
In the burbs, families usually seek to internalize their needs (pool in the backyard, media/TV room, rec-room in the basement, fenced yard to run around, basketball net in the driveway, etc.).
In an urban setting, you want and need those same things, but you share them with others. We go to community pools or the beach in the summer. My kids play in the park across the street with the neighbour-kids. We walk over to the school to play in the playground on the weekend. We need to be more watchful of the kids, which isn't always convenient, and the communal spaces suffer from the usual urban problems, and sometimes you don't want to share. The upside is that we know our neighbours very well and there is more variety within easy walking distance. It's easy to be a single-car family downtown. Some of our friends have no car, though I have to say owning a car is very convenient.
We're all just as happy as our suburban friends. A mix of urban and suburban options would seem ideal. But the towers are not for families. I would say more 3-4 story buildings (condos or rentals) designed for families, with matching community parks and centers, is the way to increase density without increasing misery. Just my 2 cents.
I think towers under a dozen or so stories are probably OK. I live in a 14 story building & lots of kids here. My daughter lives in a 12 story building downtown & that's where my granddaughter has grown up.
But agreed anything much higher is not suitable for children.
It's not a binary choice of high rise vs suburbia. Midrise buildings, townhomes and stacked townhomes, semi-detached houses, garden suites, and 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6-plexes are all part of the mix. (For example, if you look at places like London, Paris, and even New York City, it's not all high rises; buildings in the first two cities tend to be around 6 stories tall, and even Manhattan is dominated by 10-story apartment buildings.)
You can densify a _lot_ without moving to high rises, but if you look at zoning maps of Toronto, it's dominated by areas where (until recently) it was _literally illegal_ to build anything other than single-family detached houses. Therefore, developers had to go through a huge amount of paperwork and bureaucracy to get a "variance" approved, incurring a big fixed cost and requiring big delays. If you have to go to all that trouble no matter how much you're densifying, you're going to apply for the biggest thing you can possibly get, because it's more profitable.
The solution is to liberalize zoning laws, including as-of-right zoning for midrises, as erstwhile chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat tried to do: https://spacing.ca/toronto/2013/01/29/zoning-for-midrises/
"Suburban nostalgia is real. What’s the answer?"
It's a tradeoff. There's plenty of people who want to live close to work, trading space for time. Then they can get around by taking transit or even walking, instead of living further out and spending more time driving to and from work, fighting traffic. Conversely, there's other people who would like to live further out and have more space; perhaps they only need to go to the office once or twice a week, so they're fine with a longer commute.
As John describes, pushing land reforms so that municipalities allow more height and density, especially close to transit, would allow the more "urbanist" people to live where they want. And this would also help reduce the cost of land further out, helping suburbanites. Right now, restrictions on height and density are like pushing down on a balloon: the people who would have lived in the centre don't disappear, they move further out. So the demand just gets spread out, pushing up land prices everywhere. (It's unbelievable that the average home in Tillsonburg is more expensive than in Tokyo.)
Recognize it as nostalgia, then understand that the world has changed.